


One Universe Over

by inukagome15



Category: Avengers Assemble (Cartoon), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Crossover, Domestic Avengers, First Kiss, Fluff, Friendship, Getting Together, Humor, M/M, Romance, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 13:33:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5165687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inukagome15/pseuds/inukagome15
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a reason the Avengers and the Fantastic Four didn't do much work together, and it could all be lain at Reed's feet. Crossing dimensions and meeting another version of their team hadn't exactly been in Steve's and Tony's plans, but at least it wasn't the Cabal. Or Doom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Universe Over

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic for [luvindowney](http://luvindowney.tumblr.com), which rolls in at about 5,000 words. They asked for a crossover between MCU and Avengers Assemble, and this was quite a lot of fun to write.  
> On the other hand, summaries are not so much fun.
> 
> For anyone else who is interested in checking out my work, please feel free to find me on [tumblr](http://inukagome15.tumblr.com)!

The Fantastic Four and the Avengers didn’t have many interactions, mainly because the four were usually off doing something in outer space while the Avengers took care of Earth. This was one of those rare times when something the Fantastic Four had done had to be cleaned up by the Avengers, and Tony didn’t even mind.

Because if there was one thing Tony enjoyed doing, it was poking fun at Reed Richards’s mistakes and inability to think ahead. And the fact that one of his satellites had started malfunctioning and needed to be fixed was nothing  _but_  funny and worthy of poking fun at Reed for.

Then there was the little fact that this was at most a two-person job, and as Sam was staying on Earth to monitor the repair efforts from a distance, Steve was coming with Tony. Thor and Hulk were too likely to break something, and Natasha and Clint didn’t have the strength for moving large things around even in zero gravity.

Though, admittedly, Tony had his own reasons for suggesting Steve as his partner on this mission.

“How’s it looking?” Steve asked, holding onto the satellite ten feet above Tony’s head.

“Perfect,” Tony said, messing with some wires. “I’m in awe of my own genius.”

There was a small sigh from Steve that was probably him agreeing. “That mean you’re almost done?”

The suit’s HUD showed the most important readouts from the satellite. “Sam? How’s it looking down there?”

“Good for the most part,” Sam said. “But I’m picking up some energy fluctuations.”

The HUD’s readings pulled up the readings Sam was looking at. “I’ll take a look.”

“Anything we should be concerned about?” Steve sounded slightly concerned.

“I don’t think so.” Tony finished with the wiring and closed the panel, screwing it shut. Then, jettisoning up to where Steve was floating, he took a closer look at the power source that was malfunctioning.

“I was right over that.” Steve drifted back a few feet, face strained.

“Unless you stuck something in it, you’re fine,” Tony assured him, eyes on the readings the HUD was giving him now. “What’ve you got, Sam?”

“I’d like to know what Reed was working on,” Sam answered, eyebrows scrunching together on his small image on the HUD. “It’s nothing I’ve seen before.”

“Portals, probably,” Tony said dismissively, opening the panel closest to the power source.

“Shouldn’t you be careful, then?” Steve hovered behind Tony, fingers resting lightly on his armored shoulder to anchor himself.

“There’s no way Reed would have a working portal up here. It could potentially affect the Earth, and then bad things would happen.” Tony peered at the mini-computer that was hidden in the panel, checking the system stats. “He’s not  _that_  irresponsible.”

Sam made a disbelieving noise. “This is the guy who accidentally modified his family’s genes, right?”

“He must’ve learned from his mistake,” Steve protested.

The computer was insisting that there was nothing wrong with the satellite, but the readings on the HUD were insisting otherwise, and Tony trusted his tech more than Reed’s. He tapped at the small keyboard, flicking through the different menus until he reached one where he could fiddle with the energy output.

“Maybe we should ask Reed about this,” Steve said after a moment.

“I can do this,” Tony said, keeping the irritation out of his voice through sheer willpower.

A few minutes later, Tony pressed the ENTER button and waited for the results.

“Uhhh, Tony?” Sam sounded alarmed. “This doesn’t look good.”

Well, maybe some of the readings were a little on the high side, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything… “It’s fine, I’ve got it—”

“Tony!”

* * *

A splitting headache woke Steve up, the likes of which he hadn’t experienced since getting the serum. He groaned, bringing one hand up to clutch his head, the other coming up to shield his face from the blasted sun. He was reminded rather rudely of the fact that he was wearing a space suit.

It took a moment too long for him to realize that he was no longer drifting about in outer space but rather lying on the hard ground, the smell of dirt and grass tickling his nose. Managing to open his eyes, Steve noted with relief that he was in Central Park, the familiar buildings of New York City touching the sky in the distance.

Off to the side, Steve heard a faint groan, then a clanking sound that was a metal suit being moved in a way it shouldn’t be. Rolling over, Steve saw Tony pushing himself to his knees, his body language conveying exactly how bad he felt.

“We’re back on Earth,” Steve said, propping himself up on an elbow. He reached for his shield, lying several feet away, reassuring himself with the touch.

Tony paused, head craning back. “So we are.” The faceplate lifted, Tony squinting into the sunlight. “That portal must’ve been a trip back to the surface.”

Rolling to a sitting position, Steve pulled the space suit’s helmet off, breathing in unfiltered air with relish. Eventually, he said, “I thought you said you had it handled?”

“I did!” Tony’s face looked just as grumpy as his voice. His faceplate snapped shut a second later. Then, “I’m not getting Sam on the line, and JARVIS is unresponsive.”

“That mean anything?”

“Not really.” Tony tilted his head to the side in a gesture that Steve recognized as him checking the suit’s systems. “Just that the communications systems are fried. The readings I’m getting are from that energy in the satellite.”

Standing up, Steve wobbled for a second, vision spinning. After a few steadying breaths, Steve managed to pull himself together enough to offer Tony a hand up. The reassuring feel of Tony’s armored hand in his bolstered Steve even as it sent a tingling warmth through his body. As soon as he could, he let go, though he didn’t put more space between them.

“We’re missing about an hour,” Tony said once he was upright. “We should head back to the tower to let them know we’re in one piece. And, hopefully, Thor and Hulk haven’t completely wrecked the place.”

Tony’s luck was such that it was highly likely they  _had_  done so. The two couldn’t seem to go a day without punching some sort of hole in the walls, and by this time Steve suspected that Tony  _enjoyed_  constantly remodeling the walls. There was no other reason that the man wouldn’t have put up stronger walls otherwise.

“Let’s,” Steve agreed, stepping closer to let Tony wrap an arm around his waist. He barely had time to put his foot on Tony’s boot before the suit took off and the grip around his waist tightened.

Really, the “hug-and-fly” wasn’t the  _best_  way to fly with Iron Man, but it was the…nicest. It was the worst in a fight, but it was perfect for those leisurely flights through the city where there weren’t any baddies to shoot. It also let Steve be close to Tony without worrying about Tony feeling anything weird.

But like usual, the flight was over too soon for Steve’s liking. Avengers Tower was in eyesight of Central Park, and it was scarcely five minutes later that Tony dropped down on the landing pad, his arm around Steve loosening as his boots touched the ground. Steve took a moment to pull away, only then realizing the odd way Tony was carrying himself.

“Something wrong?” Steve asked, quickly scanning the surroundings.

“The design’s slightly different,” Tony said, head tilting down to study the ground.

Steve looked again, this time inspecting the tower and realizing Tony was right. The landing pad was completely different from how Steve remembered it, and there was no way anyone could have redesigned it in the hour they were missing.

“This means something bad, doesn’t it?” Steve asked after a moment, already resigned to bad news.

The noncommittal noise from the suit didn’t exactly comfort Steve. “Weeelll…if you count another you and me staring weirdly at us from a starkly designed living room as ‘bad,’ then yes.”

“What do you mean ‘another you and me’?” Steve demanded, alarmed.

In answer, Tony pointed at the glass windows to the tower, which promptly slid open and revealed another Tony and Steve who were looking at the two of them as if they were odd specimens.

The other Steve looked rather flushed, his hair sticking up in all directions. The other Tony didn’t look much better and was actually straightening his shirt, even as his eyes inspected them too closely for Steve’s liking.

“This isn’t a hallucination, is it?” the other Steve asked.

With an amused grin, the other Tony tucked his hands into his pockets, raising his eyebrows. “Nope. But I’m guessing this is going to be  _fantastic_. I can’t wait to see the look on Fury’s face when he finds out.”

Steve’s Tony opened his faceplate, looking rather cautious. “You don’t seem very surprised.”

“We’re  _very_  surprised,” the other Tony assured him.

“And hoping for an explanation,” the other Steve added, giving his Tony a look that Steve recognized all too well. It was that look that said “stop joking, this is serious.”

“Don’t bother running off,” the other Tony said breezily. “JARVIS’ll lock you down immediately.”

Tony brightened. “You have JARVIS here?”

“Dude, Tony, what the  _fuck_?” Clint’s voice sounded, surprised. He came out behind them, eyes on Steve and Tony. “Did you seriously clone yourself? I thought we agreed on no cloning!”

“We never agreed on that,” the other Tony protested.

“Yes, we did! It was right up there with not building a homicidal robot!”

“I don’t build the homicidal robots.”

Clint shot Tony a look that was entirely unimpressed, his eyebrows scrunching together. “Cloning?” he accused.

“I didn’t clone them,” the other Tony said, shooting Steve and Tony a look. “They just popped out of nowhere. Besides,  _my_  suit isn’t that bulky, and I’d never design Steve a suit that clunky.”

“That suit is state-of-the-art!” Tony protested indignantly.

“For outer space, isn’t it?” The other Tony gave Steve a closer look, eyes scanning him from head to toe in a way that had him feeling naked.

The other Steve sighed, the sound tinged with something that Steve recognized as fondness. “Enough, Tony. We’re not asking them anything until we check them out.”

Surprisingly, the other Tony didn’t even put up a fuss. “You two”—he pointed at them—“c’mon. Bruce’ll put you through the works, and then we’ll talk.”

Steve shared a perplexed glance with Tony, reading the same question on his face that Steve had.  _Bruce?_

“And lose the suit,” the other Tony told Steve’s Tony. “Steve gets grumpy when we wear weapons inside.”

Tony hesitated, eyes flickering between the other Steve and Tony and Clint.

“We won’t hurt either of you,” the other Steve said, the corner of his mouth curling up slightly.

“ _Much_ ,” Clint muttered, promptly turning away from the other Steve’s disapprovingly arched eyebrows.

“Well, that sounds like Clint,” Tony said finally, touching his right fingers to his left wrist. His armor disassembled, falling to pieces around him before he snapped his wrist and it reassembled to stand between him and Steve.

Without the suit, Steve could more easily compare his build to the other Tony’s, and it was easier still once they stood next to each other and Steve was on the same level as them. His Tony was broader in the shoulders, his neck more thickly corded with muscle; even his arms were thicker, though the other Tony was no slouch in that department. Most amusingly, his Tony had at least several inches on the other Tony, something which clearly had the other Tony at least slightly irritated.

“Oh my God, he’s taller than you.” Clint snickered, cackling loudly when the other Tony made an indignant noise.

Steve shared another glance with his Tony, simultaneously amused and relieved that these people weren’t  _too_  different from the Avengers he remembered.

Then again…who the hell was Bruce?

* * *

“Their DNA is identical to yours,” one Bruce Banner said about thirty minutes later, not looking up from the  _holographs_  floating in front of his face. He pushed his glasses up his nose, now glancing at the other Tony. “Where did you find them again?”

“I didn’t,” the other Tony said, giving Steve and Tony a closer and more interested look now. “They just showed up.”

“Not through choice,” Steve’s Tony said, picking up something that looked like a sheet of glass and holding it up to eye level. “Nice. This is a tablet?”

“Yep.” The other Tony somehow crumpled the holograph Bruce had been looking at into a ball, tossing it into a trash can that appeared at eye level. “So…not clones, then?”

“They have the same DNA as you,” Clint pointed out. “They’re clones.”

“We aren’t clones,” Steve said, resisting the urge to pinch his nose or roll his eyes. His counterpart was already doing the latter.

“Then what are you?” the other Steve asked, his tone one that implied he was expecting answers.

Steve met his stare with his own. “People.”

“He means humans,” Tony said, eyes flicking over to Steve. “Is Sam here? It would be good to have another brain on this.”

The other Tony, Steve, Clint, and Bruce exchanged glances, their faces doing a complicated dance of gestures that involved waggling eyebrows, pursed lips, scrunched noses, and what looked a wink from Clint.

“No idea who that is,” the other Tony said eventually, giving them an apologetic shrug. “But we’ve got Bruce, and he’s  _amazing_.”

Bruce’s cheeks seemed to turn slightly red, though Steve couldn’t be too sure of it since he ducked his head and turned away.

“Sam Wilson?” Tony asked. “Falcon? You really don’t know him?”

“We haven’t got anyone with that name on the team,” the other Steve said.

“Really?” Tony deflated slightly, putting the tablet down. “So who do you have?”

“Natasha and Thor are the only ones we’re missing,” Clint said after a moment’s consideration. “Thor’s off on a date with Jane, and Nat’ll be back later.”

Tony paused, eyebrows inching up. “You’re missing a Hulk?”

Steve seemed to realize that Tony had stumbled across an awkward topic when no one answered the question, everyone staring at him with peculiar looks on their faces.

Then, finally, Bruce gave a stilted cough, raising his hand slightly. “Hi.”

Steve’s eyebrows flew up despite himself.  _He_  was the Hulk?

“Oh. Huh.” Tony squinted at him, seeming to put two and two together. “How does that work? Ours would sooner knock over the tower than be anything but green.”

“Wait.” Clint leaned forwards, expression incredulous. “Are you telling me that where ever you’re from, he’s big and green  _all_  the time?”

“Never been anything but since the time we’ve known him,” Tony said, passing by Steve to bump shoulders with him.

“How does that even work?” The other Tony had a familiar look on his face that just screamed “I’m going to dissect this until I understand.” “Doesn’t he just smash stuff? You can’t really have a conversation with him beyond asking what type of sandwiches he wants—”

“ _Tony_ ,” the other Steve cut him off. “That’s enough.”

The other Tony didn’t blink. “Oh, c’mon, Cap. You do realize this definitively proves the existence of the multiverse, right? There’s a hell of a lot we could learn from these two—”

“ _No_ , because the next thing you’ll be doing is building something that will decide we all need to die.” With his arms folded across his chest and his squared shoulders, the other Steve made for an imposing visage.

“Your angry face is more impressive,” Tony whispered to Steve, face a few inches from his.

Steve glanced at him. “I don’t have an angry face.”

“You do.” Tony was smirking in that way that sent shivers down Steve’s spine. “It’s very impressive.”

His eyebrows drew together before he could stop them, lips thinning.

“See!” Tony clapped a hand onto Steve’s shoulder. “There it is.”

Steve opened his mouth, about to say something – he wasn’t sure what yet – when he noticed the looks the others were giving the two of them. The other Steve and Tony were giving the two of them indiscernible looks, eyes unreadable, but Clint and Bruce were both unabashedly staring, visibly surprised.

“They actually  _get along_ ,” Clint murmured, eyes wide. “Bruce, pinch me.”

Bruce pinched Clint even as the other Tony scowled. “Steve and I get along!”

“Oh, you poor deluded thing.” Clint seemed to consider patting the other Tony’s cheek but reconsidered when he received a glare. “Sooo…why don’t we compare movies?”

* * *

An hour into the most boring movie Steve had ever had the luck to watch – which was possibly in French but he wasn’t sure since he’d tuned out five minutes into the awful soundtrack – he was pretty sure that Clint was just pulling their leg about comparing movies. Even Tony, who spoke French fluently, seemed to have lost the plot and was poking around at the personal effects strewn about.

Steve had pulled some boxers out of the couch and wasn’t sure whose they were, only that the other Steve and Tony had looked vaguely shifty upon seeing them before proceeding to ignore him entirely. Tony had taken one look at them and promptly snatched them away to drop them over the back of the couch to be forgotten.

Now it was an hour later and someone was serenading someone else with a horribly cliché love song and Steve was just about nodding off until Tony leaned in close, the warmth of his body a blazing heat alongside Steve’s side and jolting him awake.

“Thoughts?” Tony whispered, breath tickling Steve’s ear.

Repressing a shiver, Steve turned his face to Tony. “On what?”

“Y’know.” Tony nodded to the others, more specifically their counterparts. “Never thought I’d see another you and me and not be locked up behind bars. Which is what I would have done if lookalikes had dropped in out of nowhere.”

After a moment’s consideration, Steve had to admit Tony had a point. “Your point being?”

Tony shrugged, stretching his arms before letting them drop along the back of the couch, fingers brushing against Steve’s neck. “Just a thought.” His teeth glinted briefly as he grinned.

A popcorn kernel nailed Steve in the forehead and fell into his lap. He gave it a pointed look before staring at the back of Clint’s head.

“No plotting where we can’t hear you,” was all Clint said, not even bothering to turn around.

“They don’t look shifty enough to be plotting,” the other Tony dismissed, looking bored out of his mind.

“And you’d know?” The other Steve gave his Tony a disapproving look.

“It’s in the eyes, mon Capitaine.”

“That doesn’t explain why you just let us in before,” Steve said. “What if we were villains?”

“Oh, please. JARVIS ran a full bio scan of the two of you the moment you landed  _and_  you looked identical to us. There’s nothing getting past  _him_.”

“Except for Natasha,” Clint muttered.

The other Tony rolled his eyes. “He  _lets_  her get past. You think he doesn’t see the two of you sneaking in and out?”

A few seconds later, JARVIS said, “You last attempted to subvert my systems at eleven P.M. yesterday. Agent Romanov did so two days ago at three A.M.”

Clint stiffened, head craning back to narrow his eyes at the ceiling. “Spynet,” he accused.

“I have not attempted world domination.”

“ _Yet_.”

“He hasn’t gotten hacked or shut down?” Steve asked, ignoring the affronted glare his Tony shot him at the insinuation that his JARVIS was anything but perfect.  _Hammer_  had hacked into JARVIS not long ago, and he could list several other times that JARVIS had been incapacitated.

But the other Tony was looking just as insulted. “What do you take me for? What’s the use of an AI that runs everything if he gets  _hacked_? Or shut down?”

“JARVIS does the hacking,” Natasha’s voice said, and she slid into the loveseat several feet over, giving Steve and Tony a cursory glance. The only thing Steve noticed as different about her was the hair, which was cut short. “And he’s very good at it.”

The other Tony actually preened at the compliment, and Steve could see his counterpart smiling fondly at him. The smile vanished the moment he saw Steve looking at him, replaced with an impassive visage.

“So, you’re from another universe?” Natasha sounded slightly curious.

“I blame Reed,” Tony said, settling back into the couch with a slightly sulky expression. “It was his satellite that was messing up.”

After a pause, the other Tony said thoughtfully, “I don’t think we have a Reed.”

“No,” Bruce said. “We definitely don’t.”

“But we have a  _reed_ ,” Clint said, grinning smarmily. He yelped a moment later when a pillow hit his head. “Nat!”

Ignoring the byplay, Tony huffed. “No Sam  _and_  no Reed? Either you’ve got the best or the worst luck.”

“We didn’t go jumping dimensions,” the other Tony said breezily. “I’m going with best.”

The other Steve coughed something that sounded suspiciously like “ _Mandarin_ ,” but that couldn’t have been right. A fruit?

“That was your fault, too, you carrot,” the other Tony said, shooting the other Steve a nervous glance for some reason. “I  _called_  you.”

“After you got blown up.”

“He seems alive for someone who got blown up,” Tony said, nonplussed.

“Because I,” the other Tony said with great satisfaction, “am a  _phoenix_.”

There was utter silence for several moments save for the characters on the screen wailing about something before Bruce bent over, methodically pulled one of his slippers off, and then threw it at the other Tony’s head.

After some indignant spluttering and the other Tony throwing the slipper back and nailing Bruce in the forehead, Clint told them all to shut up and watch the damn movie.

A few minutes later, Steve’s Tony pushed in closer to whisper, “He doesn’t smile the same way.”

Steve started slightly, frowning. Throwing a glance at the other Steve, he found his counterpart shooting looks at the other Tony on the sly. “What?”

“I dunno.” Tony lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Not as big? They’re just not the same. And he’s smaller than you.” He spread his hands to demonstrate what he meant. “Shoulder-wise.”

“ _He’s_  not as big either,” Steve said eventually, nodding towards the other Tony. “And he’s older.” There were wrinkles and laugh lines around the other Tony’s eyes that his didn’t have. (And when did he start thinking of Tony as  _his_?)

“And he smiles like me?” There was a teasing lilt to Tony’s words.

“No,” Steve answered reflexively. “They’re…different.” He didn’t know how to explain it exactly, but he also had the feeling that they hadn’t exactly seen the other Tony’s real smiles, since the ones Steve had seen looked a bit too predatory to be genuine.

Tony made a small humming sound, eyebrows scrunching briefly before they smoothened and his attention returned to the movie.

After a moment, Steve followed suit, though his mind wandered five minutes later and he found himself wondering just when Tony Stark had become an expert on his smiles. And for that matter, when had he become an expert on Tony’s?

* * *

Following a restless night consumed with thoughts on how to reverse the process and send them back, Tony finally decided enough was enough and got up. He didn’t bother to make himself presentable except for pulling on his clothes before heading to the elevator that would take him to the penthouse.

He didn’t think anything of having to give his fingerprints, and the living room was empty. But the kitchen wasn’t.

In front of the stove, which had something sizzling merrily on top of it, the other Steve and Tony were kissing. Or, well…making out, since it wasn’t really chaste, not with the way the other Tony’s arms were wrapped around his waist.

But it also wasn’t dirty. There was a sense of domesticity attached to the scene that had Tony feeling hot under the collar, and it wasn’t because this scene was his every fantasy come to life.

After another moment of hoping that the two would notice they weren’t alone and that the eggs were taking on a rather burnt smell by now, Tony decided to intervene. “So, this is all lovely and domestic, but your eggs are burning.”

The other Steve and Tony jumped apart like they’d been scalded, cheeks flushed, lips red, and…that was a hickey on the other Steve’s neck, wasn’t it?

“How long have you been standing there?” the other Tony demanded.

“Long enough,” Tony drawled, grinning widely. “Sooo…how long has this been going on?” And how did it start?

Giving his burnt eggs a sad poke with his spatula, the other Steve sighed and answered, “Six months.”

“It’s been that long?” The other Tony sounded surprised. “Huh.” Scratching his neck, he flicked his gaze to Tony, considering. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“No, don’t do that  _thing_.” The other Tony rolled his eyes, folding his arms and leaning back against the counter. “You’re different but not  _that_  different.”

Tony opened his mouth, couldn’t think of anything to refute that, and shut it. “Fine,” he conceded grudgingly. “But he doesn’t feel the same way.”

After gingerly scraping the burnt eggs off the pan and into the trash, the other Steve turned to Tony, smile soft and gentle. “He looks at you the same way I look at my Tony.”

“ _Your_  Tony?” Although the other Tony’s tone was mocking, there was no hiding the softness in his eyes and the tenderness in his smile.

“Well, there are two of you here at the moment.” His smile turning even gentler, the other Steve closed the space between them.

A clattering noise behind Tony had the two of them flinching back, heads turning to him as one. A plastic water bottle rolled to a stop by Tony’s feet; he looked up to see a rather dumbfounded Clint.

“Oh my God.” Clint sounded slightly faint.

The other Steve took a step forward. “Clint—”

Clint didn’t let him finish, voice hitting the upper registers with ease. “You  _turnips_! How long have you been together? Who won the betting pool?”

“ _Betting pool_?”

Sparing only a brief thought for why the hell they were insulting each other with vegetables, Tony quickly decided to do the mature thing and leave this to them to figure out. Besides, he had his own Steve to see.

* * *

Steve was vaguely surprised to see Tony join him in the gym, since he would’ve thought that Tony would be in the workshop. Still, he couldn’t help but admit that he was pleased to see him.

“Done doing science?” Steve asked him with a smirk, unable to resist teasing him.

“Ahhh, yeah…” Tony trailed off, frowning slightly as he looked intensely at Steve.

When Tony didn’t say anything else but continued to stare at him, Steve shifted self-consciously. Did he have something on his face? “What?”

“Did you know that our counterparts are together?”

Steve blinked, then, “What?” He felt like a broken record.

“Yeah.” Tony shrugged, shoulders drawing closer in that way that signaled his discomfort. “And they…well…looked pretty happy about it.”

Steve could all too well picture what that looked like. He’d seen how his counterpart looked the other day, and now those glances made a lot more sense. Something kindled in his chest, and it took a moment for him to realize that it was jealousy.

It was a moment before Steve realized he was expected to say something. “All right.” From the displeased expression crossing Tony’s face, that wasn’t what he was supposed to have said.

“Just all right?” Tony demanded, shoulders lifting briefly. “I would’ve thought you’d have something else to say.”

“Such as?” The disgruntled look on Tony’s face prompted Steve to add, “There’s nothing to say.”

“Really? Our counterparts from a different universe are in a relationship and you’ve got nothing?”

Steve had a lot to say, but he didn’t think it was anything Tony wanted to hear. Tony had made it clear plenty of times how outdated he thought Steve was. There was no way he’d be interested.

“No, come on. I know that look.” Tony closed the distance. “You’ve got something to say.”

Stiffening, Steve was about to back away, put some much needed space between them, but the moment he did, something suspiciously like hurt flashed through Tony’s eyes. Forcing himself to still, Steve was extremely conscious of Tony’s warmth bare inches from him.

“Steve.” Tony’s voice was low.

The words were out before Steve realized he’d said them. “Maybe I want that, too. But I know that’s not going to happen—”

Tony had pressed their lips together, hands fisted in Steve’s hair, and somehow Steve’s hands had made their way to the small of Tony’s back. He wasn’t quite sure what happened there.

“You jerk,” Tony said roughly, pulling away just enough to speak.

“Me?” Steve laughed breathlessly. “How am I a jerk? I can’t read minds, Tony.”

“You were just going to stew,” Tony accused him. “And we would’ve gone back and I would’ve thought it was your forties’ hang-ups on being gay—”

“I didn’t want to presume,” Steve said, unable to resist kissing the corner of Tony’s mouth. He shivered lightly at the warmth of Tony’s body pressed against his.

“Presume away,” Tony said airily.

Steve’s fingers flexed where they were clutching Tony’s shirt; he let go, smoothing the wrinkles out, nodding.

“I  _knew_  you two were together!” Clint’s voice came from the entrance of the gym.

The other Steve and Tony stood next to him, both looking rather sheepish but pleased.

A blond man that could only be this world’s Thor grinned. “Indeed. If you two are ready, Heimdall can return you to your home.”

Tony shared a look with Steve, his smile softer than Steve had ever seen it before. “Yeah, I think we are.”

**Author's Note:**

> The reason for the vegetable insults? There was a head canon going around that Steve doesn't approve of ableist language, so the Avengers slowly start using insults that are "safe" to use. Hence vegetables.
> 
> Do let me know what you thought!


End file.
